Veteran Media lawyer David Hooper’s Buying Silence focuses on the controversial issue of SLAPP cases – Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation – which are designed to censor, intimidate and silence. Critics by burdening them with aggressive opposing lawyers, heavy legal costs and enquiry agents until they abandon the case. Power of money enabled the very wealthy to crush their critics and outlines the tactics they used. Hooper examines how billionaire oligarchs, often ex-convicts and linked to organised crimes, have tried to launder their reputation in this country by suing for libel, and how they have found lawyers only too happy to pocket their roubles.

He  needed an armed bodyguard while collecting evidence in Moscow, when he examined Boris Berezovsky. It was a case where both plaintiffs were ultimately murdered, as was his client, the editor of Forbes Russia.

The UK also has its home-grown slappsters, of whom Nadhim Zahawi, and Mohammed Amersi are most recent examples. They also come from Greece, Sweden, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Malta and the United States.  Hooper describes how those with something to hid tried, with varying degrees of success, to stop you known about it, and how their lawyers were willing to help them. The well-paid legal profession  of over 1000 attorneys and 108 law firms across the world, does not emerge with credit.

The activities of Indian cyber firm BellTrox ( also hired to spy on and try to discredit modern lawfare.

The widespread abuse of English libel courts by oligarchs and criminals, going about surveillance, intimidation, and other tactics used alongside legal threats to chill public interest reporting.

Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who was facing 40 legal cases when she was murdered by a car bomb in Malta six years ago. Hoopers charts strategic lawsuits against public participation  aimed at intimidating and silencing targets from the days of James Goldsmith’s legal disputes with Private Eye in the 1970s to Roman Abramovich’s attack on the author Catherine Belton and Harper Collins, Lawyers have found to justify their exorbitant fees rendering in the UK, in the words of leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, “ not the land of free speech, It is the land of expensive speech”.

These legal firms in the UK and the in the US not only offer steeply priced legal assistance, but also offer wide range of reputation management services too, including PR consultants to private investigators and in some cases cyber mercenaries such as Bell Trot. The new privacy laws of the digitalise are being weaponised, Data protection law is increasingly being abused, far more effectively than libel, to chill free speech.

Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov, Tory donor Mohamed Amersi and former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi are just a few  who it seems ended up inflicting worst damage on their reputations by pursuing unsuccessful claims or complaints. 

Hoopers prescribes fines for solicitors’ misconduct should be higher – at the moment, the upper limit us just £25, 000 and solicitors must apply robots money laundering and accuracy checks on clients and even judges needs specialist training in fast moving developments in technology, social media and AI.

Buying Silence: How Oligarchs, Corporations, and Plutocrats Use the Law to Gag Their Critics by David Hooper,  Biteback £25, 384 pages.